By Ivanna Berrios
On Tuesday, November 11th, Manuela Lavinas Picq gave a book talk on her new book Vernacular Sovereignties: Indigenous Women Challenging World Politics. The talk took place at the Latin American and Latino Studies department office housed in the McNeil Building at Penn and was attended by a small group of about 20 people. The attendees were a mix of undergraduate students, professors, and scholarly peers. The students of ANTH 317, “The Politics of Matter and the Matter of Politics” taught by Kristina Lyons, attended as a group.
Professor Lavinas Picq is a professor of political science and Latinx and Latin American Studies at Amherst University. She is also a professor of International Relations at Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), Ecuador. Professor Picq began her talk with a land acknowledgement of the Lenape people on whose land Pennsylvania was founded on. She went on to highlight the horrifically high number of missing and murdered indigenous women in the United States and Canada. Initiatives like the REDress Project seek to bring attention to this violence with a visual component and tend to receive a fair amount of publicity. However, as Picq pointed out, we don’t often hear about how indigenous women actively shape politics. The stories of indigenous womens’ political autonomy and successful struggles are less widely known. Picq’s book and lecture was predicated on addressing exactly that.
Picq gave some background history on Ecuador’s 2008 constitutional reform that provided an opportunity for indigenous Kichwa women of Ecuador to have their say in national politics. The reform occurred under the presidency of the young left-leaning Rafael Correa, who had been elected the year prior, and sought to implement social and economic policies that would benefit the majority of the country. The colonial history of Ecuador has resulted in the treatment of indigenous people as second-class citizens with less access to education, economic stability, and representation in politics. Furthermore, within indigenous communities indigenous women experience misogyny and the effects of machismo and patriarchy.
The case of indigenous women fighting for political recognition that Picq discussed began in 2006, when a Pachakutiq elder viciously beat his wife and his wife found no support at the local police station. There was mention of indigenous sovereignty and rights in the pre-2008 constitution but nothing explicitly recognized the rights of indigenous women. The Kichwa women in the area realized that Correa was calling for a Constituent Assembly that would ideally represent the will of the people in drafting a new constitution; they saw their chance to write into law measures that would protect women like themselves and the wife of the Pachakutiq elder. A national feminist group met at a hacienda in Chimborazo to discuss what measures for women they would propose to the Assembly, but the owner of the hacienda did not let the Kichwa women in. The predominantly male-led indigenous advocacy groups of Ecuador did not want to work with the women either. A lawyer counseled the Kichwa women to change their demands, saying the problem was that “[they were] trying to put together cultural, collective rights with individual, women's rights.” According to Picq, the women responded, “we want to invent our own rights.”
The process of the Kichwa women drafting a proposal to the Assembly lasted a year and resulted in the codification of Article 171 of the Constitution that states:
“The authorities of the indigenous communities, peoples, and nations shall perform jurisdictional duties, on the basis of their ancestral traditions and their own system of law, within their own territories, with a guarantee for the participation of, and decision-making by, women.”
Although every Latin American constitution contains some recognition of indigenous justice, Article 171 of the 2008 Ecuadorian constitution became the first to explicitly mention indigenous women. Furthermore, the Article entails gender quotas for the administration of justice in indigenous communities, something that has no equivalent in the United States or Europe. This international milestone represents what the Kichwa women called “democracia con diversidad” (democracy with diversity) and was long overdue. Picq emphasized the need for success stories like these to be told. They serve not as exact models that other groups should emulate, but rather examples of how one can push the boundaries of state models.
What exactly does Picq mean by “vernacular sovereignties?” She explained that she was inspired by the term “vernacular architecture.” Vernacular architecture is characterized by its functionality and use of local materials and knowledge. Similarly, Picq conceptualized instances of indigenous women winning victories at the national level as being examples of “vernacular sovereignties.” These “vernacular sovereignties” serve as adaptations of Western designs that incorporate ancestral structures and address local conditions. Picq described how many indigenous people do not want to be incorporated into the Western ideal of a “social contract” under the state and would rather have their own autonomy. Some Latin American countries such as Ecuador and Bolivia acknowledge this by being plurinational states, but Picq emphasized that this co-existence and gesture towards indigenous autonomy does not work as well in practice. Instead, Picq argues that indigenous women have adapted the constitutionalism of the state to fit their own needs; “because they are a victim of the state they keep the state as a tool.”
These “vernacular sovereignties” articulate local forms of government in ways that claim authority and are not legible from the eyes of the state. Picq theorized that this leaves the state looking like a swiss cheese with holes in it. To survive, the state must make concessions to those that put pressure on it. Picq argued that these concessions carve away at the state bit by bit and change its nature, forcing it to be beholden to indigenous communities and particularly to indigenous women. Picq’s book and lecture are important contributions to how we understand indigenous movements, particularly in the context of Latin America. Often, because of the hypervisibility of Latin American mestizos, Latin American countries are mythologized as being composed of harmonious, mixed raced societies. The reality is that “la raza” often actively disenfranchise indigenous communities in their countries and the constitutions of said countries reify this inequality. Rafael Correa did not grant indigenous women their rights with the 2008 reform; rather, Kichwa women capitalized on the opportunity to demand rights for themselves.
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